alt Hacker NewsIsn't this a chicken-egg thing?
Businesses started advertising that they had an app because user's preferred apps, having had so many poor experiences with websites and web "apps" that the entire field was tainted.
This is 100% a "made your own bed" kind of thing. Again, the general standards among web apps for years were terrible, and users became accustomed that using a website on a mobile device was a brutal experience. Things have gotten a lot better, and honestly AI tooling should massively improve the space, but people really need to be honest about root causes.
I mean...a local grocery store advertises their "app" and it's just their website wrapped into a webview, and it is just total dogshit. Because they brough the extremely poor standards they have in their web domain into the app domain, and it simply doesn't transfer.
https://dennisforbes.ca/blog/microblog/2026/05/terrible_mobi...
I don't agree with your thesis that users hated websites on mobile. It's not so much a question of being "honest about root causes" if consensus on the root cause doesn't really exist.
Apps initially looked like the fancy thing to do (so marketing departments loved them), and very quickly snowballed into becoming simply "the way it's done" on mobile.
Most of them are just their website wrapped into a webview. They're sometimes awful, but they mostly do the job well enough - exactly as well as if it was a website instead (coming back to this thread's article).